CFD Simulation of Olive Oil Mill Wastewater Biodegradation in a Luffa Packed-bed Bioreactor

فاقد چكيده فارسي

Packed-bed bioreactor is known as an efficent technology in the wastewater treatment due to its high removal efficiency and low investment and operating cost. However, the present state of bioreactor modeling is not adequate for design and optimization of treatment process. It is well known in the chemical and biotechnology field that a more detailed description of fluid mechanics and nutrient transport within process equipment can be achieved via the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) technology as a robust modeling tool. In this study, CFD technique was used to investigate the total phenolics biodegradation in a Luffa packed-bed bioreactor operating in batch mode. The developed Eulerian-Eulerian two fluid model was used to evaluate the bioreactor efficiency and phenolic compounds concentration gradients through the bioreactor under transient condition. The simulation results were compared to the experimental data and a satisfactory agreement was observed with an absolute error less than 10%. Thus, the results confirms that CFD is as an excellent tool for analyzing biological systems as well as flow within bioreactors.